The many meanings of the word "globalization"
have accumulated very rapidly, and recently, and the verb, "globalize"
is first attested by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in
1944. In considering the history of globalization, some authors
focus on events since 1492, but most scholars and theorists concentrate
on the much more recent past.

But long before 1492, people began
to link together disparate locations on the globe into extensive
systems of communication, migration, and interconnections. This
formation of systems of interaction between the global and the
local has been a central driving force in world history. [for
very, very long-term world system history, see Andre Gunder Frank and especially "the five thousand year world system: an interdisciplinary
introduction," by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills.]

Q: what is global?

A:
the expansive interconnectivity of localities -- spanning local
sites of everyday social, economic, cultural, and political life
-- a phenonmenon but also an spatial attribute -- so a global
space or geography is a domain of connectivity spanning distances
and linking localities to one another, which can be portrayed
on maps by lines indicating routes of movement, migration, translation,
communication, exchange, etc.

Q: what is globalization?

A:
the physical expansion of the geographical domain of the global
-- that is, the increase in the scale and volume of global flows
-- and the increasing impact of global forces of all kinds on
local life. Moments and forces of expansion mark the major turning
points and landmarks in the history of globalization

1. c.325 BCE: Chandragupta Maurya becomes a Buddhist and combines the expansive
powers of a world religion, trade economy, and imperial armies
for the first time. Alexander the Great sues for peace with Chandragupta
in 325 at Gerosia, marking the eastward link among overland routes
between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and Central Asia.

2. c.1st centuries CE: the expansion
of Buddhism in Asia -- makes
its first major appearance in China under the Han dynasty, and
consolidates cultural links across the Eurasian Steppe into India
-- the foundation of the silk road.

3. 650-850: the expansion of Islam
from the western Mediterranean to India

4. 960-1279: the Song Dynasty in
China (and contemporary regimes
in India) which produced the economic output, instruments (financial),
technologies, and impetus for the medieval world economy that
linked Europe and China by land and sea across Eurasia and the
Indian Ocean.

5. 1100: The Rise of Genghis Khan
and the integration of overland routes across Eurasia -- producing
also a military revolution in technologies of war on horseback
and of fighting from military fortifications.

6. 1300: the creation of the Ottoman
Empire spanning Europe, North
Africa, and Middle East, and connected politically overland with
Safavids and dynasties in Central Asia and India -- creating the
great imperial arch of integration that spawned a huge expansion
of trade with Europe but ALSO raised the cost for trade in Asia
for Europeans ---

a side effect of this was the movement
of Genoese merchant wealth to Spain to search for a Western Sea
route to the Indies

7. 1492 and 1498: Columbus and da Gama travel west and east
to the Indies, inaugurating an age of European seaborne empires.

8. 1650:the expansion of the slave trade expanded was dramatic
during the seventeenth century -- and it sustained the expansion
of Atlantic Economy, giving birth to integrated economic/industrial
systems across the Ocean -- with profits accumulating in Europe
during the hey day of mercantalism and rise of the Englightenment.
(estimates of slave trade population)

9. 1776/1789: US and French Revolutions
mark the creation of modern
state form based on alliances between military and business interests
and on popular representation in aggressively nationalist governments
-- which leads quickly to new imperial expansion under Napolean
and in the Americas -- the economic interests of "the people"
and the drive to acquire and consolidate assets for economic growth
also lead to more militarized British, Dutch, and French imperial
growth in Asia. These national empires expand during the industrial
revolution, which also provokes class struggles and new ideas
and movements of revolution within the national states and subsequently
in their empires as well. The historical chronology of modernity coincides
with the chronology of globalization from the eighteenth century.

10. 1885: Treaties of Berlin mark a diplomatic watershed in the age modern
imperial expansion by European and American overseas empires,
beginning the age of "high imperialism" with the legalization
of the Partition of Africa, which also marks a foundation-point
for the creation of international law. In the last decades of
the 19th century, the global "white man's burden" became a subject
of discussion. (Here is an old syllabus for an undergraduate course
on "US Empire" with some useful links.)

11. 1929: the great depression hits all parts of the world at the same time
-- in contrast to depression of late 19th century, but following
rapid, simultaneous price rise in most of the world during the
1920s. Preceded by first event called World War and followed by
first really global war across Atlantic and Pacific.

12. 1950: decolonization of European empires in Asia and Africa produces
world of national states for the first time and world of legal-representative-economic
institutions in the UN system and Bretton Woods.

--- perhaps 1989 and the end of the
cold war and globalization of post-industrial capitalism which
appears to be eroding the power of the national states is on a
par with the watershed of the 1950s -- we'll see ,Part II

Part II: globalization since the fourteenth
century

1. The Segmented Trading World of Eurasia, circa 1350

By 1350, networks of trade which involved frequent movements of
people, animals, goods, money, and micro-organisms ran from England
to China, running down through France and Italy across the Mediterranean
to the Levant and Egypt, and then over land across Central Asia
(the Silk Road) and along sea lanes down the Red Sea, across the
Indian Ocean, and through the Straits of Malacca to the China
coast.

The Mongols had done the most to create a political framework
for the overland network as attested by both Ibn Battuta and Marco
Polo. The spread of Muslim trading communities from port to port
along the littorals of the Indian Ocean created a world of sea
trade there analogous to the world of land routes in Central Asia.

This was a world of commodities trades in which specialized groups
of merchants concentrated their energies on bringing commodities
from one port to another, and rarely did any single merchant network
organize movements of goods across more than a few segments of
the system. For instance, few Europeans ventured out of the European
parts of the system; and the most intense connections were among
traders in the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal or the South China
Sea regions of the oceanic system.

The novelty of the physical integration of the trading system
is indicated by the spread of the Black Death in Europe -- which
was repeated in waves from the fourteenth through the sixteenth
centuries -- because the plague traveled from inland Mongolia
and China to Europe by land and sea, lurking in rodents that stowed
away on ships, feeding on their food supplies. The epidemics in
Europe indicated a relative lack of exposure to the plague bacillus
before then -- and though some outbreaks are indicated along the
coast and in China at the same time, it appears that plague was
endemic to the Asian parts of the system.

The parts of the system depended upon one another and with increasing
frequency travelers record movements across the whole system are
recorded from 1300 onward, as by Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, and
others. Janet Abu Lughod argues plausibly that the so-called "rise
of Europe" after 1500 followed a mysterious period of decline
in the Chinese part of the system, and that in the 1300s, it was
actually the vast expansion in production in China that was most
responsible for the integration of the trading system -- because
all roads led to China in the medieval trading world. The expansion
of the Chinese economy in this period is well documented and included
agriculture and industry -- and the Mongol regime in China was
significant force in tying China into the world economy more forcefully.

Coercion and state power was critical in producing stable sites
of trade and accumulation along routes of exchange and in protecting
travelers on the long overland routes between sites. There does
not seem to have been any significant military power at sea.

Exchange within the various regional parts of the system was connected
by networks of trade to commercial activity within trade and power
relations in other parts -- in a segmented system of connections,
like pearls on a string -- and observers made it very clear that
states took a keen interest in promoting and protecting trade,
even as rulers also used force to extort revenues and coerce production
here and there.

In South Asia, it should be noted, the Delhi Sultanate and Deccan
states provided a system of power that connected the inland trading
routes of Central Asia with the coastal towns of Bengal and the
peninsula and thus to Indian Ocean trade for the first time.

Ibn Battutaas much as the Khaljis and Tughlaqs represent
the nature of the agrarian environment in the fourteenth century,
and though warriors did use force to collect taxes, there was
also substantial commercial activity in farming communities over
and above what would have been necessary to pay taxes. Agrarian
commercialism inside regions of trading activity clearly supported
increasing manufacturing and commercial activity -- and also a
growth spurt in the rise of urbanization.

Ibn Battuta (1350) -- like Abu-l Fazl (1590) and Hamilton Buchanan
(1800) -- viewed his world in commercial terms, and standing outside
the state, he does not indicate that coercion was needed to generate
agrarian commodities. At each stop in his journey, he observed
everyday commercialism. "Bangala is a vast country, abounding
in rice," he says, "and nowhere in the world have I
seen any land where prices are lower than there." In Turkestan,
"the horses ... are very numerous and the price of them is
negligible." He was pleased to see commercial security, as
he did during eight months trekking from Goa to Quilon. "I
have never seen a safer road than this," he wrote, "for
they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit
falls no one picks it up but the owner." He also noted that
"most of the merchants from Fars and Yemen disembark"
at Mangalore, where "pepper and ginger are exceedingly abundant."
In 1357, John of Marignola, an emissary to China from Pope Benedict
XII, also stopped at Quilon, which he described it as "the
most famous city in the whole of India, where all the pepper in
the world grows."1

2. The European Seaborne Empires, 1500-1750

a. Phase One: the militarization of the sea, 1500-1600

Vasco da Gama rounded Africa in 1498 and forced rulers in the
ports in the Indian Ocean system to pay tribute and to allow settlements
of Portuguese military seamen who engaged in trade, supported
conversion, acquired local lands, and established a loose network
of imperial authority over the sea lanes, taxing ships in transit
in return for protection. The militarization of the sea lanes
produced a competition for access to ports and for routes of safe
transit that certainly did not reduce the overall volume of trade
or the diversity of trading communities -- but it did channel
more wealth into the hands of armed European competitors for control
of the sea. The Indian Ocean became more like Central Asia in
that all routes and sites became militarized as European competition
accelerated over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the
Portuguese were joined by the Dutch, French, and British.

b. Phase Two: early modern world economy, 1600-1800

The commodities trades continued as before well into the seventeenth
century, concentrating on local products from each region of the
Eurasian system -- Chinese silk and porcelain, Sumatra spices,
Malabar cinnamon and pepper, etc. -- but by the 1600s, the long
distance trade was more deeply entrenched in the production process.
An expansion of commercial production and commodities trades was
supported by the arrival into Asia of precious metals from the
New World, which came both from the East and West (the Atlantic
and Pacific routes -- via Palestine and Iran, and also the Philippines
and China).

Like the plague in the 1300s, new arrivals in Europe after 1500
signal the rise of a new kind of global system. In medieval Europe,
there was no cotton cloth, and no cotton cloth was produced for
export anywhere except in the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean.
Europeans began not only to buy this cloth for export to Europe,
but to commission cloth of specific types for specific markets,
and to take loans from local bankers and engage in commodities
trades within the Indian Ocean system so as to raise the value
of the merchant capital that they could re-export to Europe.

By 1700, European capital invested in trading companies traveled
regularly to Asia on ships insured and protected by European companies
and governments, in order to secure goods produced on commission
for sale and resale within Asian markets, with the goal of returning
to Europe with cargo of sufficient value to generate substantial
profits for investors. Circuits of capital thus moved along trade
routes, across militarized sea lanes, and organized production
of cloth for export in Asia. This Eurasian extension of the circuits
of merchant capital did not only emanate from Europe; it also
included large expansions within Asia itself, not only among the
merchants and bankers who financed the regional trade and facilitated
European exports, but also along financiers who provided state
revenues in the form of taxation. The connections between state
revenue collection and commodities trades became very complex
and the Europeans were surrounded by Asian "portfolio capitalists"
(as they have been dubbed by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Chris Bayly)
who operated both in the so-called private and state sectors.

By 1700, also, competing European powers also controlled the Atlantic
Economy; and like cotton from Asia, sugar and tobacco from the
Americas arrived in Europe as commodities within circuits of world
capital accumulation (see Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World
Scale). The role of primitive accumulation was much
greater in the Atlantic System, including the capture of native
lands in the Americas, forced labor in the silver mines of Peru,
the purchase of slaves captured in wars along the African coast,
the forced transportation of slaves to the Americas, and the construction
of the slave plantation economy in coastal Americas. The volume
of the slave trade peaked around 1750.

By 1800, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean systems were connected
to one another via the flow of currencies and commodities and
by the operations of the British, French, and Dutch overseas companies
-- all being controlled, owned, or "chartered" by their
respective states. The 17-18th centuries were the age of mercantilism,
in which state power depended directly on the sponsoring and control
of merchant capital, and merchant capital expanded under the direct
protection and subsidy of the state treasury. It has been argued
that the expansion of "portfolio capitalists" in the
Indian ocean reflected a similar kind of mercantilist trend in
Asia during the eighteenth century.

Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Ch'ing empires provided an overland
system of economic integration and interconnection that was more
expansive than any before. Asian capital, coercive power, and
productive energies were dominant in determining economic trends
in the Asian parts of the world economy. European activity has
long received the bulk of the attention by historians concerned
with the integration of the early modern world economy, but from
Istanbul to Samarkhand, Cochin, Dhaka, Malacca, Hong Kong, Beijing,
and Tokyo, they were not the most prominent players in most of
the major sites of economic and political activity until the later
nineteenth century. Europeans were dominant only in the Atlantic
System in the early eighteenth century -- the hemispheres of the
world economy remained, in this respect, very different.

3. The World Empires of Industrial Capitalism, 1750-1950.

a. Phase One: the formation of national economies

Basic eighteenth century economic conditions continued well into
the nineteenth century, until the railway and steam ship began
lower transportation costs significantly, and to create new
circuits of capital accumulation that focused on sites of
industrial production in Europe and the US. But important structural
changes in the world economy began in the later decades of the
eighteenth century.

First, European imperial control of the Americas was broken, first
in the north and then the south. This accelerated the rise of
capital and capitalists as a force in the reorganization of nationally
defined states, whose professes purpose was the political representation
of the interests of their constituent property owners and entrepreneurs.
The independence movements in the Americas and revolutions in
Haiti and France produced new kinds of national territoriality
within the world economy, and states that strove for greater
control of resources within their boundaries than any before.
Adam Smith and Frederick Hegel were two important theorists of
this transitional period -- both of whom took a universal few
of national issues, and theorized a great transformation away
from an age of kings and emperors toward an age ruled by peoples
and nations.

Second, European imperial expansion shifted into Asia, where the
use of military power by European national states for the protection
of their national interests became a new force in the process
of capital accumulation. Chartered companies were criticized by
Adam Smith as a state-supported monopoly -- for the English East
India Company had a monopoly on the sale of all commodities imported
into England from the "East Indies," which included
all the land east of Lebanon -- and this early version of the
multi-national corporation expanded its power base in India
with government support but without official permission. The British
empire expanded without official policy sanction throughout most
of the nineteenth century, as British troops went in simply to
protect the operations of British nationals operating as merchants
overseas.

The national state thus became both a mechanism for the control
of territory within its own borders and for the expansion of national
enterprise around the world. The US expanded over land and into
Latin America by the expansion of the enterprise of its citizens
and expansion of its military power, as the British empire expanded
into Asia and then Africa -- along with the French and Dutch.
In the discourse of nationalism, the "nation" and "empire"
lived in their opposition to one another; but "economic imperialism"
was standard practice for economically expansive nation states,
and "gun boat diplomacy" became a typical feature of
economic transactions among hostile states.

The 1840s form a watershed in the institutionalization of a world
regime of national expansion and international economic organization
-- when the British navy forced open the interior of China to
British merchant settlements with military victories waged during
the Opium Wars to protect the right of British merchants to trade
in opium in China; and when the US Admiral Perry forced the Japanese
to open their ports to American trade.

b. Phase Two: world circuits of industrial capital

The integration of separate, specialized world regions of agricultural
and industrial production within a world economy of capital accumulation
occurred during the nineteenth century. The industrial technologies
of the factory, railway, telegraph, gattling gun, and steam ship
facilitated this development; but as important were the organizational
technologies of modernity, which include state bureaucracy, land
surveys, census operations, government statistics, national legal
systems, and the like. The result was not only the creation of
regions of the world with their own distinctive economic specializations,
integrated into one world system of production; but also the construction
of a single world of rules and regulations for the operation of
the system. This change did not happen over night, but it was
clearly moving ahead at the start of the nineteenth century and
well advanced by the end.

Institutional markers: (1) the abolition of the slave trade and
(2) the rise of international protocols for the operation of national
competition at a world scale, culminating in the treaties of Berlin
that organized the partition of Africa in the 1880s.

Market indicators: (1) the South Sea Bubble and the crashes of
the 1820s and 1830s, (2) the depression of 1880-1900 and its impact
on Africa.

Regional Cases: (1) the US South, (2) the world cotton economy,
(3) jute in Bengal.